Don't Ignore Experience

I admit, I am not the world's greatest chef. Here's the list of things I make well: cheeseburgers, steaks, pasta, omelets, rice, chicken, pudding and French toast. As you can tell, I pretty much only know how to make things I would want to eat myself. (I'm also quite good at ice cream sundaes and chicken cesar wraps, but I feel like those should be categorized more as 'assembling' than anything else.) If you request a dinner that consists of anything beyond those ingredients there is going to be a lot of staring at cook books and guessing on my part, along with a very good chance your meal will arrive slightly over or under-done. I'm more than willing to try and cook dinner for you, but I am much better when you make something that I can then re-heat later and serve to you on a fresh plate. I am a master of presentation. However, if you insist that I make you something, what I really appreciate during either cooking or re-heating are specific instructions. None of this "microwave for about a minute" junk, because I find that to be unnecessarily vague in this day and age. It isn't like I'm heating over an open fire and being forced to guess if something is getting enough direct heat on both sides; I'm using a microwave with a digital keypad and a countdown clock that allows me to heat something evenly and for precisely how long is required. It'll even alert me from across the room when it's done.

We have a level of technology now that allows for specificity, so let's take advantage. (Plus, I take umbrage to the notion that all microwaves are created differently, thus the power levels in them are different and cooking time should be adjusted on a microwave-by-microwave basis. Unless you bought your microwave back in the 1980s before the technology was perfected or from some brand no one had ever heard of before or since, the high setting is the high setting.) You can tell me on the number how long something needs to cook all the way through and I can be sure to hit that number every time. That is why I love it when I get directions for a frozen dinner and they say, "Heat on high for 43 seconds." What that tells me is someone sat down in a lab somewhere and played around with their microwave to arrive at such a specific number, because that is not a number you would normally put down in directions. Don't ask me why, but we humans like the numbers in our directions to end in zero or a five, so landing on an odd number couldn't be an accident or a typo, it has to be science. As such I never mess around and input my own number, which would be an affront to all the hard trial-and-error work put in by the good people in food development. Honestly, food directions are the one thing that no one ever seems to want to stick to. I'm sure just as much work went into figuring them out as went into figuring out that certain clothes should be 'Dry Clean Only', but one label is held sacred while the other is only glanced at. And you wonder why your chicken nuggets come out soggy.

-So, last night was the season premiere of HBO's annual NFL show, Hard Knocks. For those of you who haven't seen it, basically HBO is granted unbelievable access behind the scenes at an NFL training camp and they document everything that happens for the four weeks to show viewers how an NFL roster is formed. It always ends up being one of the most entertaining shows on television. They pick a different team each year so it doesn't get repetitive and invariably I end up rooting for either the team or at least the various players at the back of the roster. The problem is that this year the team happens to the New York Jets, who I just can't root for because they share a division with the Patriots. And this team, feature attention-hogs like Jason Taylor and LaDanian Tomlinson, should be especially easy to dislike. However, I have to admit that one episode in I'm starting to be swayed by Rex Ryan, who is the Jets' head coach. He's a big, brash and loud guy who curses like a drunken sailor... in other words, he's exactly what you want a head football coach to be. Something tells me that if he was coaching almost anywhere else I would be a big fan of this guy. I do, however, feel bad for whoever is working as an audio editor for the NFL Network, because they like to re-air the show later in the season and that poor person is going to have a hell of a time cutting Ryan's audio down to anything that could air on a basic cable station.